From Tustin to the White House

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WASHINGTON It's a Friday afternoon and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney is about to engage with 30 reporters in the White House briefing room. As he approaches the lectern, Carney makes a brief, matter-of-fact announcement that the president would be traveling to Louisiana the following week.

Moments later, after leaving out the back door, I'm greeted by Joanna Rosholm – young and tall with a vibrant grin – a White House regional communications director.

Through the Palm Room, through the Rose Garden, through the halls of the West Wing, Rosholm walks with a purpose, like others we pass along the way. She stops, finally, in the Ward Room, a secluded and vacant dining room sharing the same name as a Naval officers dining room somewhere in the belly of the West Wing.

“It should be quiet here,” Rosholm says as she sits at the elegant dining table.

“Did Jay make an announcement about Louisiana?”

Rosholm, 28, caught the politics bug through an inspiring professor.

She was taking a political communications course at Chapman University and the professor, Kevin Jones, presented compelling subject matter, emphasized by examples from “The West Wing.”

“It was so fascinating, the inner workings of government from a communications perspective,” she says. “I decided I was going to move (to Washington) no matter what.”

She worked closely with Jones to tailor her curriculum to political communications. She also tasted the real thing in 2003 as an intern in Rep. Loretta Sanchez's office in Santa Ana.

“I told her to go get an internship with a local (politician). I meant a mayor or something,” says Jones, now at George Fox University in Oregon. “But she just went straight to a congresswoman.”

After graduating from Chapman, Rosholm entered graduate school at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. While there, she interned at the Democratic National Committee. Then, after getting a master's degree and serving a brief stint in the private communications world, she went back to the DNC.

Three years ago, Rosholm switched to the White House.

“You might say she is lucky and in the White House,” Jones says. “But she didn't just fall into it backward. She worked hard and prepared and learned. She would come to my office and say, ‘What else do you have that I can read?' She never passed up an opportunity to learn more, to prepare.”

The day after Rosholm was born, her mother, Deborrah, died from a rare disease, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

At the time, according to Rosholm's father, Don, there were only some 50 known cases of Ehlers-Danlos. Don pored over his wife's family history, looking for clues and patterns and answers, and discovered that the disease was hereditary. He eventually provided his research to the National Institutes of Health, which Don says had been unaware of the hereditary nature of the disease.

Rosholm doesn't mention this part of her history unless asked. The Foothill High School graduate says it's hard to gauge the effect it had on her, since she grew up with her father and brother, in Tustin, “not knowing any differently.”

“As I got older, and started hanging out with my friends' families, I started realizing that there was this piece missing,” Rosholm says, adding that any feeling of loss was minimized by a strong family support system.

One of her favorite childhood pictures is of her in Don's lap, while he's wearing a shirt that says “World's Greatest Mom.”

“Really, my dad bent over backward and did his very best, and he did a great job,” Rosholm says. “But my grandma had a really big hand in it as well.”

Although Rosholm grew up apolitical, she would go with Don to the polls on Election Day. But unlike Don, a Republican, she gravitated toward the Democratic Party after examining the positions of Sanchez and Rep. John Campbell, R-Irvine, in whose district she lived.

“So I applied for an internship in Loretta Sanchez's office,” a grinning Rosholm says, “much to my dad's chagrin.”

Today she's a key part of the White House communications team, focusing on half of the country – the South, part of the Midwest, the West Coast, Hawaii and Alaska.

She has no typical day. She might answer emails from reporters or fly on Air Force One to prepare for a presidential event.

She's become accustomed to running into President Barack Obama in the hallways, between meetings. “At first, you get a little scared because it's surreal,” Rosholm says. “After a while, you get used to it and say, ‘Good morning, Mr. President,' and keep walking.”

Still, three years in and it's not old.

She has trouble classifying days as good or bad. Instead, she says, it's all rolled into one challenging and rewarding experience.

Certain days do stand out, though.

One came earlier this year, when she was sent to Moore, Okla., after a tornado killed 23 people, including seven schoolchildren.

“There was so much destruction that it was hard to even digest it. We were touring a school where small children had drowned. ... I got dropped off early in the morning at the site, because there are two press people, and the other was going to greet the press at the airport and ride in the motorcade to get there. And it was just me, in the middle of that school, all by myself.

“It was a lot to take in.”

If there was a bad day, that would have been it. But she says helping the president bring hope and assistance to victims of tragedy gives her a greater sense of purpose.

The day of her interview with the Register included disparate projects. She was preparing for the Chicago Blackhawks, the National Hockey League's 2013 champions, to visit the White House. She also was monitoring the Nov. 1 shooting at LAX, informing the public of Obama's position.

And she had finished prepping the statement for the press briefing about Obama's trip to Louisiana – the one Carney referenced.

No task, she says, is meaningless.

“You start realizing what you do is making an impact,” Rosholm says. “And at the end of the day it's all about the president, and what his goals are, and us trying to help him achieve those goals.”

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